Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [87]
Fantine earned too little. Her debts had increased. The Thénardiers being poorly paid, were constantly writing letters to her, the contents of which disheartened her, while the postage was ruining her. One day they wrote to her that her little Cosette was entirely destitute of clothing for the cold weather, that she needed a woollen skirt, and that her mother must send at least ten francs for that. She received the letter and crushed it in her hand for a whole day. In the evening she went into a barber’s shop at the corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her beautiful fair hair fell below her waist.
“What beautiful hair!” exclaimed the barber.
“How much will you give me for it?” said she.
“Ten francs.”
“Cut it off.”
She bought a knit skirt and sent it to the Thénardiers.
This skirt made the Thénardiers furious. It was the money that they wanted. They gave the skirt to Eponine. The poor lark still shivered.
Fantine thought: “My child is no longer cold, I have clothed her with my hair.” She put on a little round cap which concealed her shorn head, and with that she was still pretty.
A gloomy work was going on in Fantine’s heart.
When she saw that she could no longer dress her hair, she began to look with hatred on all around her. She had long shared in the universal veneration for Father Madeleine; nevertheless by dint of repeating to herself that it was he who had turned her away, and that he was the cause of her misfortunes, she came to hate him also, and especially. When she passed the factory at the hours in which the labourers were at the door, she forced herself to laugh and sing.
An old working-woman who saw her once singing and laughing in this way, said: “There is a girl who will come to a bad end.”
She took a lover, the first comer, a man whom she did not love, through bravado, and with rage in her heart. He was a wretch, a kind of mendicant musician, a lazy ragamuffin, who beat her, and who left her, as she had taken him, with disgust.
She worshipped her child.
The lower she sank, the more all became gloomy around her, the more the sweet little angel shone out in the bottom of her heart. She would say: “When I am rich, I shall have my Cosette with me,” and she laughed. The cough did not leave her, and she had night sweats.
One day she received from the Thénardiers a letter in these words: “Cosette is sick of an epidemic disease. A miliary fever they call it. The drugs necessary are dear. It is ruining us, and we can no longer pay for them. Unless you send us forty francs within a week the little one will die.”
She burst out laughing, and said to her old neighbour:
“Oh! they are nice! forty francs! think of that! that is two Napoleons! Where do they think I can get them? How stupid these peasants are.”
She went, however, to the staircase, near a dormer window, and read the letter again.
Then she went down stairs and out of doors, running and jumping, still laughing.
Somebody who met her said to her: “What is the matter with you, that you are so gay?”
She answered: “A stupid joke that some country people have just written me. They ask for forty francs; the louts!”
As she passed through the square, she saw many people gathered about an odd-looking carriage on the top of which stood a man in red clothes, declaiming. He was a juggler and a traveling dentist, and was offering to the public complete sets of teeth, opiates, powders, and elixirs.
Fantine joined the crowd and began to laugh with the rest at this harangue, in which were mingled slang for the rabble and jargon for the better sort. The puller of teeth saw this beautiful girl laughing, and suddenly called out: “You have pretty teeth, you girl who are laughing there. If you will sell me your two incisors, I will give you a gold Napoleon for each of them.”
“What is that? What are my incisors?” asked Fantine.
“The incisors,” resumed the professor of dentistry,